Main menu

Xydias shares a laugh during remarks at his 90th birthday celebration. Photo by Mark Vaughn

Original hot-rod hero, founder of the SoCal Speed Shop and revered icon from the golden age of Southern California motorsports Alex Xydias celebrated his 90th birthday Saturday, June 16, with more than 400 friends, admirers and fellow rodders at a gala fundraiser in Pomona, Calif.

“It's been a wonderful life,” Xydias said at the end of the evening.

Even more so than the Jimmy Stewart character Xydias was inadvertently quoting, Xydias' life spanned almost the breadth and depth of the American century. Born to immigrant parents in 1922, Xydias bought his first hot rod at age 19, a '29 Ford, which he and a friend drove to their first dry lakes meet at El Mirage in 1941.

What he saw at El Mirage would set him on a life course that would intersect with the greatest names in hot-rodding, drag racing and car culture . . . eventually. As with everything else in 1941, the war intervened. Xydias was in the Army Air Corps, stationed in Douglas, Arizona.

“For three and a half years, I was mostly saving Arizona,” he said. “We all knew that at any minute the Japanese were going to come through.”

The Japanese didn't come through, and by 1945 then-Sgt. Xydias had a 1934 Ford Phaeton and big plans. When he was on leave back in Southern California, a friend took him to a street race on Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. He saw “hundreds of kids there drag racing.”

“I was stunned,” he recalled. “There was obviously a lot of enthusiasm for it.”

So he started planning then and there to open a speed shop as soon as he got out of the service, even though the term “speed shop” hadn't been fully invented yet.

As soon as he was discharged in 1946, he rented a $100-a-month storefront on Olive Boulevard in Burbank and started selling chrome carburetor stacks and steel wheels. Whenever he needed something more substantial for a customer, he “went over to Vic's” i.e., Vic Edelbrock Sr.'s shop, and brought back a manifold. The year 1946 saw a new shop on Victory Boulevard and the christening of the new name, SO-CAL Speed Shop. (The shop was rechristened SoCal Speed Shop when it was revived by Pete Chapouris.)

“To get the SO-CAL name out there, we decided to build a belly tank,” Xydias said.

The rest is history.

Along with the shop's famous streamliner, coupe and roadsters, the belly tank did more than just get the name out there. SO-CAL creations were the first to go 170, 180 and 190 mph on the lakes. By 1950, the streamliner had run 210 mph. By 1953, SO-CAL was running drag races, “since you could drag-race every weekend while Bonneville came but once a year,” and the SoCal coupe set a new record—132 mph—at the new Pomona drag strip. The name of the shop was so well known that Xydias joked about its reknown: “People would come out from back East, they'd drive by Lockheed, and they thought it was us.”

By the end of the decade, a crash and the loss of some key personnel at the shop saw Xydias close SO-CAL and turn to filmmaking, documenting the great motorsports events of the day. Xydias would cover not only the local drags but also the Indy 500, Pikes Peak and races at Daytona, showing the edited films in local theaters days after the events themselves (this was long before motorsports was covered on television). He kept up as a filmmaker for a few years until 1963, when he accepted a job from his friend Pete Petersen as editor of Car Craft magazine and later as publisher of Hot Rod. From there, he and Petersen started what is now known as the SEMA show. He did the same working with Mickey Thompson to establish the SCORE off-road equipment show.

By 1987, he was 65. He retired after selling the off-road show and thought he'd take it easy for a while. That lasted about a minute. Over dinner at the Bakersfield Hot Rod Reunion with collector Bruce Meyer, Meyer mentioned that he wanted to find and restore the original SoCal belly tank. That lead to an association with hot-rod builder Chapouris—whom Meyers chose to rebuild the belly tank—that has lasted ever since.

Xydias' 90th birthday celebration was held at the Pomona Fairplex's new conference center, a thrown rod away from the Pomona drag strip, and it was a benefit for two charities. One was the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, also on the Fairplex. The second was the Alex Xydias Center for Automotive Arts, which goes a long way toward replacing auto-shop classes for kids in the Pomona area. Part of the fundraising included an auction of some of Xydias' trophies, our favorite of which was the one the streamliner got at the first Bonneville Speed Trials in 1949. That one went for more than $13,000.

“We didn't spend that much on the whole car that won this award,” Xydias said.

But that's the price people are now willing to pay for something that comes straight from such an authentic piece of history made by such a completely American icon, and one that Xydias, the epitome of Southern California hot-rodder, was willing to donate to such worthy causes.

Mark Vaughn
- After working in Europe five years covering F1, Group C and German Touring Cars, Vaughn interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since. He still can't believe his good fortune.
See more by this author»